The lack of direction, the shit ending, and the apparent "we made it all up as we went along" feeling at the end of BSG is I think the number one reason why any new stories in that universe are destined to fail. Its hard to get anyone to care about the setting, when you know that every bit of history, meaning, mystery, or depth they try to establish in the setting will ultimately be meaningless.

...Explain the nature of Starbuck and the Head Six, Baltars (advanced AI perhaps), meaning of All Along The Watchtower. Saying that, I didn't have much of a problem with the ending myself, thought it was suitably epic, and comparing it to the majority of television finales it is actually one of the better ones. Too much reliance on Deus Ex Machina to wrap things up? Sure, but I actually thought the presence of a God in a genre that mostly plays in a atheist sandbox refreshing (and I'm an atheist)

I enjoyed the ending to the Galactica series, I didn't have any problem with it at all, it could have easily ended up a generic ending but had enough twists and 'ooh right I wasn't expecting that' to work for me. Upon finishing the series I had to go back and buy The Plan and anything else I was missing from it. Baltar was a great character, and his interaction with 6 was hilarious at times

I see this written about the BSG ending all the time. Why is anything that happens in the series made pointless by the finale? Really don't understand the criticism. TBH, BSG is one of the best series finales I can think of.
Maybe only The Wire, Six Feet Under and Sopranos are better, but thats quite the competition.

I give you that the episode itself isn't the best, but the final sequence is superb. Its the classic difference between an ambiguous ending that has no meaning and one deliberately designed to allow for interpretation, even though there is a 'real' way for it to be read.
Chase has as much as said so, Tony died. He got shot at the table. There's this massive essay out there on the internet that breaks down every shot of the final scene and how it ties into previous episodes and seasons. Whats so great about it is you can choose to think they all lived happily ever after if your want to.
Angel had a pretty great finale too

If you knew anything about the television industry at all, you'd know that there's nothing wrong with a show's producers "making it up as they [go] along" -- virtually every television show ever made is created without a long-term plan, even Babylon 5. As far back as Season 1, Ronald D. Moore mentioned that each season's endgame-storylines weren't readily clear until they finally got to that point in the writing process.
Simply because the show was created -- like most TV shows in history -- on the fly, season by season, doesn't invalidate it, nor the final ending. This is pretty much the way the creative process works. You refine your ideas as you go, and work in new insights and improvements and discoveries along the way.
In J. Michael Straczynski's book on scriptwriting, he cites the saying, "No plan ever survives an encounter with the enemy." Whatever plans Moore and company had at the outset of each new season would only have been a rough guideline, a mere starting point.

I always had in the back of my mind three ways the show could end. The first was they don't end it and continue searching in space. The second was they all die. The third was they find a habitable planet and make a go of it. They went with #3. Some of the plot stuff in the finale was weak... ie sending their tech into the sun. For the most part if you took out some of the religous stuff it was how I envisioned it ending in my head.

As someone who both watched the show live, and again multiple times on DVD and BD, I think to say that the spirtual aspect of the show wasn't plainly telegraphed from the first few episodes is, quite simply, wrong. A large portion of the *premise* of the show is founded on the ancient-astronaut theory, and the spiritual tug-of-war both for, and within, humanity.
If you had asked me, partway through the first season, to list a few of the central themes of the show, number one or two would have easily been "religion." Heck, the majority of imagery in the first season was almost purely religious in nature.
Does this mean the "ending" itself was telegraphed from day one? Definitely not. Clearly Moore, et al, were making portions of it up as they went along (though, personally, I think it was a lot less than many of the so-called "fans" claim). However, the influence of a spiritual belief, real or otherwise, was most definitely NOT one of those ad hoc decisions.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that a non-spiritual ending would have been surprising, and a tad (more than a tad, actually) disappointing.

why the ending bothered me: primitive humans already existed on earth and all that the BSG folks did was show up and throw a few genes into the overall gene pool. humanity would have likely evolved without their arrival just fine and therefore the entire struggle of the cast during the series was pointless. they didn't save the race and they didn't defeat their enemies. everyone just basically fades away.

I don't mind the new series but there's some annoying things in it.........like Starbuck being a woman and the Cylons being human made.
Thanks to the use of original looking Vipers and Raiders a film based more closely on the original series is even more remote.

TOS Galactica is horse shit, and I am actually a fan of it, and watched it when first aired. I've been rewatching it lately and it is campy crap.<p>
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I actually enjoyed the finale of NuBSG, but I dislike them landing 150,000 years ago. It begs the question, how did Colonial culture/religion survive more than 100,000 years until ancient Egypt and later Greece?

Sorry but I liked the ending. It didn't feel made up all along at all. They never hid the fact that there was something else going on during the entire storyline and it was in line with what the original series was hinting at.
I know the quasi-religious ending riled some people but I didn't see anything wrong with it! And I'm not particularly religious. It's just that it was more than obvious there was something else going on from the get go.
Also It was obvious that Baltar was seeing something real with #6. Also in the original series there was a higher power ( advanced beings or whatever call it whatever you will ) that was manipulating things.
So I really don't agree or see the problem here.

It doesn't matter what sex the characters are at all. That's the stupidest anti-argument anyone ever thought up, it's also the oldest and tiredest argument, and it's only made by people who are determined to not like NuBSG.

They gave the humans already there their culture ( which somehow survived the centuries ). Also the humans learned an important lesson ( which might help them get past the next part of the cycle when they developed artificial intelligence ). Treat something with self-awareness that you create with respect. It's not a toaster. If you didn't get this you missed the entire point of the series.

Boomer and Tigh were black, Adama wasn't a Mexican, Cain wasn't a lesbian or a girl....and so frakking what. If you want those things go watch TOS, but criticizing this show for making different choices is retarded, especially since these changes have ZERO effect on the quality of the show.<p>
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And if you honestly think the show isn't as good because some people are girls now then you're just a mysognist.

I can understand people defending it to the death, because they invested in it from the beginning, but two things will always remain true about that series, IMO:
1. the spiritual stuff got out of hand. The idea that something was driving things forward in the beginning was interesting and spooky, but then they showed the wizard behind the curtain and disappeared up their own arsehole. Also see: Matrix sequels.
2. All those defending the show 100%, will always try go the highbrow route and base arguments against it by saying you just don't understand 'real sci-fi' or 'real drama'. Except what was THE defining point of the series? THE best part of the whole damn show? The atmosphere jump.
Navel-gazing 'so-serious' fans and 'pew pew' space nerds alike: every single one of us got wet like a school girl on prom night when that happened, and anyone who tries to claim otherwise like they are above such things, is a fucking liar.

I only watched a few eps of the series before getting bored with it. Was the series as unimaginative as this Blood & Chrome deal? I mean, I like all the skiffy elements and the sfx, but is the only difference between these people and us that they're all polytheists and they say frack instead of fuck? That's it? I remember in the series that business people wore ties, and I thought, No way THAT evolved twice in the universe. In this new thing, they have 20th century phrases, have used a Latin phrase, name their ships from Norse mythology . . . and now a piano has shown up. Hey, they tempered the clavier too! This show is so incredibly lazy. No one is trying. How do writers this lazy get paid? I thought Lindelof was bad . . .
http://wmpreston.blogspot.com

In the BD/DVD audio commentary track on the 4-hour miniseries, Ronald D. Moore mentions that the reason Caprica Six snapped that baby's neck was as a mercy-killing, to spare it from a potentially far more painful and lingering death from radiation, etc., once the bombs dropped in a few hours' time.

Regarding the notion of English, suits and neckties, etc., being seen once again today (150,000 years later), one of the (extremely obvious) themes of the series was that such things recur throughout history, including languages, et al, and that we are simply in one more phase of the exact same cycle the Colonials went through.
It's the reason why "All Along the Watchtower" made a reappearance in the 1960s, and why we are subconsciously "remembering" our ancient Colonial ancestors now in our own, early-21st Century culture -- or, to put it another way, "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."
Moore and some of the other writers in fact directly address this theme of sociolinguistic recurrence in the audio commentaries, etc., on the Blu-Rays. Far from being "lazy writing," it's one of the core underpinnings of the show going back to the very beginning.
For crying out loud, people. It's called "literary analysis."

The most... striking member of the ensemble says in the very first episode that she is an angel. The first series was overtly religious (while this new bsg was merely on the philosophical side until the very end (and honestly it's still sci-fi, Amazing-Stories sci-fi but still (also like the ending to Mass Effect 3 but i've said enough.)))
And another thing: Ron ended it by, if you wanna get metaphorical, throwing up his hands and saying he has no idea why things are the way they are either. He shows some of his people where they were right before it started and invites you to draw your own conclusions if you don't agree with the completely fictional story thus far. For good measure he makes the last decision of the Colonies to make either a radical break with the past OR the exact same thing all the other Cylons did.
Circles within circles.

As I said, I didn't watch the whole show. I sure didn't listen to commentary by the writers. (Writers don't really get to show up and explain what they did; if it's not explained in the "text," that's too bad.) And their explanation . . . I'm still not buying it. It seems like an easy way to give up on truly creating unique cultures.
Seriously? The piano made a comeback? The tie? Latin phrases? Norse references? No. Lazy. Did they have NASCAR on Caprica? Reality TV? It's convenient for them that Mormonism makes a comeback ("Gods of Kolob/Kobol!") I guess without Joseph Smith, the whole "eternal return" concept loses all validity.

It was a conscious choice on the part of the creators to make the people in this show as recognizable as possible while still presenting them within a sci-fi setting.<p>
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Consider their technology, much more primitive than TOS Galactica. They fired bullets, missiles, and flak, no lasers or phasers, no energy weapons at all. A few minor technological breakthroughs and we could be them.

I get you. But . . . we are them. They're humans, doing human things, speaking in English, having completely identical relationships to one another. Keep the tech simple, fine. (They're sticking with the original show, really.) But the rest of the reality is utterly standard issue. And, as the show itself ultimately argues, they may be us, but 150,000 years ago (per somebody else on the thread). They have different history, different gods, different stars to look at, different ecosystems. That can be a burden to writers and set designers and costumers; I get that. But to have actually changed SOMETHING would have shown, for my money, the kind of self-respect and respect for audience any writer ought to have. I'm finding their argument disingenuous.

Is to make it more relateable to a modern audience. BSG had massive crossover appeal, I know people who were into it that NEVER watch sci-fi. If everyone had crazy hair or bumpy foreheads or wore cloaks they'd be immediately put off. The success of the show was in part down to the realistic depiction of life on a military ship. Well... at least until the killer robots and angels show up. Criticising them for taking this approach (especially when it fits perfectly with the cycle of time motif) is what is disingenuous.

All of that stuff IS explained in the "text" -- like I pointed out, there's a thing called literary analysis. It's all right there in plain view for the audience to figure out on their own, without Moore and the other writers holding our hands. Reading between the lines of a text quite often yields greater results than an initial surface-scan.
And nowhere did we ever see stuff like NASCAR, Mormonism, etc., onscreen in any of the TV series -- our two cultures have certain similarities, but also many significant divergences, as well. If anything, Colonial culture seemed to eschew many of the trappings of 21st Century American life, but it kept several others in place.
As someone else pointed out above, the main reasons for using as many recognizable, real-world touchpoints as possible were (A) to escape the cheesy '70s space-opera trappings of the original Glen Larson version, and (B) to avoid having the series' look become too "sci-fi," and thus take the audience out of the drama. Had the show looked and behaved like Star Trek or Farscape, it would've received absolutely none of the rare, mainstream critical plaudits it eventually got ("rare," for an SF television series, that is to say).

I'm not arguing for bumpy foreheads. I do take your points. I'm not arguing for the cheese. I'm saying, "Does it have to look exactly like an Earth piano circa 2010? Instead of throwing out a Latin phrase, can't you make up something and say it's in ancient Caprican (or whatever)?" It seems to me that there's a middle road, or at least more "middle" than the one they took. Obviously they're going to speak English--that's an accepted conceit so you can actually have an audience (unless you're Mel Gibson). But some things stick out to me as ill-considered, textual analysis aside. (What, writers and producers don't make mistakes, regardless of how one is to interpret their work?)